division, Matarazzo served on an agency professional-standards board during the time the interrogation program was set up, but was not consulted about the interrogations. ) Lawsuits against abusive contractors remain a possibility, and anyone of them could expose a line of authorizations lead- ing directly up the chain of command at the C.I.A., and into the Bush White House. George Brent Mickum IV, a law- yer representing Abu Zubaydah, a C.I.A. prisoner who was repeatedly water- boarded, said, "I'd like to sue Mitchell and Jessen in a minute." (Mitchell was an ad- viser on Zubaydah's interrogation.) After Zubaydah was waterboarded, his lawyers say, his mental state deteriorated, and he has since been prescribed the antipsy- chotic drug Haldol. Few activists expect lawsuits against the C.I.A. or its contractors to succeed. But John Sifton, an attomeywho special- izes in human-rights law, and who is part of Zubaydah's legal team, notes that there are other ways for the detainees' griev- ances to become public. "The act of pros- ecuting the high-value detainees will be the accountability process," Sifton said. "It's impossible to try these detainees without allowing them to air all the infor- mation about their torture." O ther legal actions threaten to expose yet more secrets of the C.I.A.' s tor- ture program. A prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department, John Durham, has convened a grand jury in Washington to weigh potential criminal charges against C.I.A. officers who were involved in the destruction of ninety-two videotapes documenting the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and other detainees. Mickum told me that he has met several times with Durham, and believes that the scope of his inquiry may have expanded to include a re- view of whether the C.I.A. began using brutal methods on Zubaydah before it re- ceived written authorization from the Jus- tice Department. (This would provide an extra motive for destroying the videotapes.) Mickum said, "I got the sense he was very serious." (Durham declined to comment.) The A.C.L.U., meanwhile, is suing to get access to classified descriptions of what was on the destroyed videotapes. Last week, Panetta filed an affidavit opposing the dis- closure, which he said "could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security." Once again, he was protecting Bush-era interrogation secrets. Pressure is also coming from abroad. In Italy, two dozen C.I.A. officers are on trial in absentia for participating in a 2003 rendition. Robert Seldon Lady, the agen- cy s station chiefin Milan at the time, can no longer travel to Italy without danger of arrest, nor can the other C.I.A. officers named in the case. Spain has opened a criminal investigation of six Bush Admin- istration officials in connection with tor- ture. And in London a former rendition victim is suing the British authorities. After a British judge ruled that the plaintiff: Binyam Mohammed, should be given access to C.I.A. intelligence docu- ments that the agency shared with British authorities, the Obama Administration surprised liberals by pressuring the British government to stop the disclosures. Several other legal challenges to the agencys interrogation program are work- ing their way through the U.S. court sys- tem. A judge in California recently re- jected the Justice Department's claims of blanket state secrecy in a case brought by five rendition victims against Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which provided the flight plans for the C.I.A.' s renditions. In a press conference in April, Obama indicated that he had had second thoughts about the Justice Department's assertion of blanket state secrecy in the case, but on June 12th the Administration reasserted its original claim. Earlier this month, Philip Mudd, Obamàs nominee for a top Homeland Security post, withdrew from consider- ation after it became clear that his Senate confirmation would turn into a fight over his previous role in the C.I.A.' s interroga- tion program. Rahm Emanuel, speaking of the many challenges posed by the tor- ture scandal, told me, "It's aday-to-day- I won't say struggle-but problem. There are a lot of cases in the queue that require response. Many of them. But I've seen the President in the Situation Room, and I know he wants to move forward." Panetta is already forging ahead on one important reform: he plans to replace the abusive interrogation program with a le- gally acceptable, non-coercive alternative. A task force led by the Harvard Law School professor Philip Heymann has been advising him on a proposal to create an élite U.S. government interrogation team, staffed by some of the best C.I.A., F.B.I., and military officers in the country, and drawing on the advice of social scien- tists, linguists, and other scholars. 'What I'm pushing for is to establish a facility where we develop a team of interrogators trained in the latest techniques," Panetta said. "That's the one thing I'm worried about, frankly. There just aren't that many people who have the interrogation abilities wère going to need." Heymann describes the effort to create "the best non-coercive interrogation team in the world" as the equivalent of "a NASA-like, man-on-the- moon effort" for human-intelligence gath- ering. He said that members of his task force have travelled to France, England, Japan, Australia, and Israel, in order to compile comparative information on what interrogators do. 'We also went to the best people in the U.S.," he added. Panetta has many ambitions for his ten- ure at the agency. He spoke to me of the need for the C.I.A. to increase its foreign- language skills, and to recruit officers of more diverse backgrounds, who can more easily infiltrate hostile parts of the world. But, as Panetta sees it, the C.I.A's effort to "disrupt, destroy, and dismandè' AI Qgeda remains its top priority. The agency con- tinues to acquire intelligence suggesting that AI Qgeda is planning attacks on Amer- ica, he told me. 'Wère conducting pretty robust operations in Pakistan, and I think wère doing a good job of trying to disrupt AI Qgeda. But, clearly, that is a threat." The greatest danger, he said, is that AI Qgeda will "find other safe havens to go to," in states such as Somalia and Yemen. "Our mission is to make sure they can't find a place to hide." Finding and bringing to justice AI Qgedàs leaders-in particu- lar, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al- Zawahiri-"remains a focal point," Panetta said. "It's not easy, as you can imagine." Last week, the Times reported on es- calating friction over jurisdiction between Panetta and Dennis Blair, the National Intelligence director. "I'm surprised at the number of challenges you have to confront in this job," Panetta confided. "You're a traffic cop, in many ways." When he was the White House chief of staff: Panetta said, he could delegate the big decisions to the President. "Here, though," he said, gazing out over the C.I.A.' s serene grounds, "the decisions come to me. And a lot of them involve life and death." Sometimes, he added, all he can do is "say a lot of Hail Marys." . THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2009 59